JK Rowling 2nd Runner up for Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year”

Putin and Gore beat out JK Rowling for Time magazine’s coveted “Person of the Year” for 2007. You can read the interview in its entirety here

He [Harry] is also a billion-dollar media property and a global cultural figure. Now translated into 65 languages, the books have joined a canon that stretches from Cinderella to Star Wars, giving people a way to discuss culture and commerce, politics and values. Princeton English professor William Gleason compares the series’ impact to the frenzy that surrounded Uncle Tom’s Cabin before the Civil War. “That book penetrated all levels of society,” he says. “It’s remarkable how similar the two moments are.” And he does not see this as a passing fad or some triumph of clever marketing. “They’ve spoken profoundly to enough readers that they will be read and reread by children and by adults for a long time,” he says. Feminist scholars write papers on Hermione’s road to self-determination. Law professors cite Dobby’s tale to teach contract law and civil rights. University of Tennessee law professor Benjamin Barton published “Harry Potter and the Half-Crazed Bureaucracy,” in the Michigan Law Review, which examined Rowling’s view of the legitimacy of government. His conclusion? “Rowling may do more for libertarianism than anyone since John Stuart Mill.” A Rutgers researcher named a rare rain-forest plant in Ecuador apparata after her verb apparate because it seemed to appear out of nowhere. French intellectuals debate whether the stories indoctrinate kids into free-market capitalism. In Turkey, the books were absorbed into the argument over Turkey’s cultural geography: Is Harry a symbol of Western imperialism or of lost Eastern traditions of mysticism and alchemy? A seventh-grade teacher in Pakistan in November invited her class to compare the country’s crisis to Harry Potter. The class immediately cast Pervez Musharraf as Voldemort and Benazir Bhutto as Bellatrix. “Potter is like a Rorschach blot,” says Georgetown government professor Daniel Nexon, “for people articulating concerns about globalization in their cultural setting. It’s incredibly significant that Potter even enters these debates.”

And that is on top of the impact, even her critics acknowledge, of inspiring a generation of obsessive readers unafraid of fat books and complex plots. “They’re easy to underestimate because of what I call the three Deathly Hallows for academics,” says James Thomas, a professor of English at Pepperdine University. “They couldn’t possibly be good because they’re too recent, they’re too popular, and they’re too juvenile.” But he argues that the books do more than entertain. “They’ve made millions of kids smarter, more sensitive, certainly more literate and probably more ethical and aware of hypocrisy and lust for power. They’ve made children better adults, I think. I don’t know of any books that have worked that kind of magic on so many millions of readers in so short a time in the history of publications.”

Also read “Ten questions about Harry” where we find out among other things that the question Rowling was afraid to be asked was “What is Dumbledore’s wand made from?”, the creature at King’s Cross was the last bit of Voldemort’s mutilated soul and that Draco marries Astoria Greengrass, younger sister of the Greengrass family, who we briefly meet in Book 5.

4 Responses

Please, oh, please, do a longer movie for 6 and 7. The people that buy the movie will beg for it and the ones who say it is too long will not suffer. It is not about special effects only – it is about the story the JKR tells. The story is the thing.

I think they should make the last two books into two movie each. There is just too much information in the books that will have to be dropped if they make one movie. More money for the studios, and more of the story on screen for us!

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